Links to more photographic history websites

Photographic history has only recently developed as a formal academic discipline in Britain and elsewhere, its progress restrained by the lack of comprehensive reference works and standard texts of the type that underpin art history and other subjects. De Montfort University is developing – within the institution and through partnerships with researchers – a corpus of searchable, high quality, resources for researchers of nineteenth century photography working from primary materials such as exhibition catalogues and letters. These resources so far comprise:

A research database containing individual records for over 20,000 photographic exhibits drawn from forty exhibition catalogues published between 1839 – 1865. Most of the images created by Fenton in the Crimea are listed.

The Correspondence of William Henry Fox Talbot is a comprehensive database of all the known letters to and from Talbot (1800-1877), the Wiltshire polymath best known for his invention of photography. It contains over 10,000 letters.

The journal of Amélina Petit de Billier was written in French, with a few entries in English or Italian. It has been preserved at Lacock Abbey since she wrote the last volume in 1835 and is now being transcribed and translated for the Fox Talbot Museum with the permission of the owners of the journal, Janet Burnett–Brown and Petronella Burnett–Brown of Lacock Abbey.